New Jack County restaurant owners answers cafe calling

Kay Bolton cooks up a grill full of burgers at her cafe The Holy Grill which opened May 19. The restaurant is open Monday through Friday for lunch. (Cherry Rushin)

Kay Bolton believes she is right where she needs to be. After owning and operating a western wear and decor store in Jacksboro, Ace’s West, for 20 years, she decided to hang up her spurs and start a cafe.She opened up the Holy Grill May 19.

“I love to cook. It’s my passion,” Kay said. “We’ve had couple of slow days, but most days it’s been good. It’s usually working men. I love to feed the working man.”

The Holy Grill serves lunch Monday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. It’s located about 20 or so miles north of Jacksboro on Highway 281 in a building that used to be a church.

“It was a church for seven years and has been closed for three or four,” Kay said. “The preacher is buried out back. I think he protects me.”

Kay, who lives two miles from the cafe with her husband Gene, had her eye on the spot for a while. “I told my husband I wanted this place. He said, ‘You don’t need it,’” she said. “I said, ‘I want it.’ So we got it and things are going good. I feel like I was told to come up here and do this.”

It isn’t her first time to run a restaurant. She had The Chuckwagon on Highway 380 West 28 years ago.

When she sold her inventory from her Ace’s West store earlier this year, she needed something to do.

“My sister-in-law got sick and I wanted to help them out,” Kay said.

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“I can’t sit at home. I don’t have any grandkids. I can’t sit at home and think about Jayson.”

Jayson was Kay’s son and only child who was killed in a car accident in 1995 at the age of 19.

Where she's at, she had the chance to feed a lost child — a hitchhiker that came in recently. Kay said the young man was traveling north on Highway 281 pushing a bicycle when he came into the cafe.

“He walked up to the counter and just looked pitiful. His eyes, he looked like he was lost,” she said.

He asked for a Coke and said he’d pay for it. So she gave him a Coke and he sat and drank it. He then asked her if he could use her faucet outside to fill up his water bottles.

She told him to bring them in and she’d wash them up and fill them for him inside. And Kay asked if he was hungry.

“He said, ‘No ma’am, I have limited funds,’” Kay said. “I told him, ‘Well I like to cook so I’m making you a steak sandwich.’”

She said she brought him a steak sandwich which he inhaled along with four Cokes and four glasses of sweet tea.

“He kept saying, ‘Well, it’s customary to leave a tip.’ I told him not to worry about it,” Kay said. “But he opened up his wallet and it had $10 in it. He left $6.”